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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Back in the late 70’s, my dad ran the local branch of the Humane Society, which, at the time, was responsible for all animal control duties within the city limits of our town. During that time, our area had a big influx of Vietnamese immigrants settling in. The amount of calls that came in accusing our new immigrant neighbors of stealing and eating dogs was unreal. Dad was a special deputy tasked with investigating animal cruelty cases, so he would look into these at first, but there was never any solid evidence that it ever actually happened, and they eventually just started ignoring the calls. I have to imagine that a lot of them were probably just racially motivated attempts at harassment…



  • When my wife was pregnant with our first-born, my mother went with her to her first ultrasound appointment. To add a little back-story, I had a baby brother who was born when I was about 4 (1967). He had multiple birth defects and so many things wrong that he only lived 16 days. Needless to say, this affected my mom deeply. My wife told me that my mom cried while seeing her soon-to-be grandson on the screen and told her that if that technology had been available when she was pregnant with my brother that she would have terminated the pregnancy without a second thought. When I think of the pain and depression she lived with for pretty much the rest of her life, and then think about how the repukelican party want’s to force other women to go through that same agony too just makes me want to start hurling molotov cocktails into a trump rally…






  • it seems to me, and I could be wrong, that they don’t accent syllables the same way, if at all. Years ago I had a database teacher in community college who was from India and it took me a couple of classes to tune in to her, but after that it wasn’t hard to follow her at all. I’m often in Zoom meetings with a software engineer who immigrated from Vietnam and he was a bit of a challenge to understand at first, too.

    Oh yeah… and my cancer doc is from Sri Lanka. That was doubly fun. His heavy accent pronouncing four-dollar medical terms took some serious getting used to. Listening to him dictate into his little recorder for the transcriptionists at the end of our visits is an added treat I always enjoy…






  • tipicaldik@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldOld-school meme
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    9 months ago

    I used to know a guy named Ed back in the early-mid '80’s who was a professional college student. We were both attending the local junior college. I was about 19 or 20, he was about 30. He was tall, had long straight dark hair and a full, fairly long beard with a fairly prominent hawk nose. One day, his parents finally got tired of him avoiding adulthood and declared they were no longer going to support him and he had to get a job. He showed up to classes with a short hair cut and no beard. We all had to do a double-take. He seriously had no chin, and combined with that big hawk nose, his profile had become so comically different from what it had been that everyone who knew him was noticeably shocked by the transformation. He went from having a long profile with a prominent nose to a little round head with a huge beak sticking out. He went from a moderately imposing figure to a sadly goofy looking character just like that. I watched a couple of different people just kind of blurt out stuff like “eww grow it back!” etc. It was crazy to see how everyone’s perception of him changed overnight…